Since the early part of this decade, there have been some unprecedented advances in the Linux operating system, driven primarily by the advancements of its graphical user interface and long-term benefits seen from the cumulative open-source endeavors. That community may not always get it right straight off, or be their first straight off, but they are FAR, FAR faster to adapt once the train is moving than any other large corporations I’ve seen, such as Microsoft and its Windows operating systems.

In addition, Microsoft has shown some unprecedented behavior this year with the early wide-beta and release candidate issuance of its Windows 7 operating system, which is still ongoing and will continue through June without numerical limit or license key restrictions — though these versions will only work for one year.

Linux is a much lighter operating system than Windows. When it boots up, there is more free memory, it uses less disk space for installation, and its applications are also smaller. It also doesn’t use the same kind of registry as Windows — something in my opinion is the worst design ever for software management, and something that slow down all of our PCs immeasurably, requiring install/uninstall operations to move software from computer to computer, rather than just copying the programs over. As such, Linux programs are easier to install, uninstall, and they launch and close faster as well. And in Ubuntu Linux, it has the Debian-based package manager, which, like the iPhone app store, provides download-list access to its 30,000+ software titles from everything from Bible Study to advanced semiconductor circuit layout, 3D design, audio, video and office apps.

And ever since VMware released their VMware Server product for free for Linux, with its ability to run Windows (and any other OS) from inside of Linux, there’s no longer any need for a person to use Windows as their primary or daily operating system. Linux can be booted into, used for nearly all apps, and for that residue Windows requirement which remains, VMware Server provide the gateway to launch Windows as a desktop application, including full-screen mode, sound, USB, hard drive, optical drive access, etc., which enables it to appear as a full Windows system, but within the Linux desktop.

There are so many advantages to Linux these days, including a massive, open-source software developer base that it seems companies can no longer deny. The significance of closed-source efforts, like Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, .NET, ASP, and pretty much everything else Microsoft is involved with, are not playing out. It was recently reported by Dell that Windows 7 will cost more than Vista. How is that helping businesses and consumers? The answer is obvious: It’s not.

The time for the switch to Linux, and in my personal opinion — having now used Ubuntu 9.04 intently for some time — has never been more ripe. And it appears the global companies are in agreement with these pronounced nods toward Linux, and new products written for Linux, and the available source code and software base which rounds out the Linux operating system to such a degree.

By way of example, I use a Verizon Wireless PCMCIA broadband card for mobile Internet access. I had been fearful in switching over to Ubuntu Linux on my notebook because I need that card to function. However, I found out that Linux has a built-in CDMA driver which operates that card. And, for all intents and purposes, I see a better network response in Linux than I do in Vista with Verizon’s dedicated VZAccess Manager software.

The cues pushing people toward Linux are growing. I would not be surprised if the future of computing is not x86/Microsoft based, but rather ARM/Linux based, as both of those platforms (the ARM CPU and Linux flavors in general, but specifically Ubuntu) show significant long-term advantages over their competition.

What will the future hold? It’s up to us to decide. Are we willing to continue feeding the Intel/Microsoft machine when both companies have been found guilty of antitrust and anti-competitive behaviors, being fined well over $1 billion each?

The time to assess our future is now. And the appeal of Linux has never been stronger. I urge everyone to think about what it is they’re looking to get out of their computer and how best to go about getting it

As a side point:

I’ve been watching the operating system industry for well over a decade with much interest. In the late 1990s I set out to write my own 32-bit operating system because I was so fed up with Windows and even Linux. The result was a kernel of less than 256KB written entirely in assembly for 80386 and later computers. It expands easily to 64-bit support, utilizes virtualization, boots in 2 seconds, and requires less than 4MB of RAM total for its core. Video display drivers increase memory needs to around 64MB total, leaving the rest of memory for applications.

While I have been one man, working in x86 assembly on this endeavor, it functions and I may soon be releasing it open-source with no license agreement — meaning it’s completely free for anyone to use for any purpose.

Speak Your Mind

Yeah, switch to Linux and pray that you can find a printer driver for your printer and video card.

Damien Sticklen

Or, just use that money for that new windows license on a cheap linux compatible printer. Actually, all my printers have worked with linux and I use HP

Gregg

Welcome to the linux community. Video driver support has improved greatly in recent years. Printers also are supported much better than in the early days. During the last couple years, even the wifi support has greatly improved. For my purposes, only my tax software still needs Windows. Maybe they’ll fix that for 2009 taxes.

Simfox

Jimmi,
You are so funny.
I’m not a geek, but I’ve installed Mandriva, PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu on at least 10 boxes over the past two years, and I’ve never had a problem with an unrecognized printer or a graphics card that didn’t work. Perhaps it’s time you gave up the childish nay-saying and tried it yourself.
–Simfox

Microsoft was actually quite a nimble corporation until 2000 or so, back when they had 30,000 employees. Their products may have been massively unreliable, but they offered impressive compatibility and were relatively efficient on standard hardware. The speed with which they reacted to the Netscape threat is just an illustration. They now have over 80,000 employees, the quality of recruiting went down and there is a well-entrenched parasitic middle-management class that promotes itself and isolates upper management from market realities.

Dave Papajcik

Best Linux distro is openSUSE with GNOME. KDE sucks.

But as a gamer, I just love my Windows boxes. Just something about them.

Eruaran

“Yeah, switch to Linux and pray that you can find a printer driver for your printer and video card.”

Where I work we now have a small but growing minority of customers who have switched to GNU/Linux, usually Ubuntu. The feedback we get from customers is that Linux works better with their hardware (in general) than Windows does. A recent customer who has a dual boot Windows XP (he won’t touch Vista) / Kubuntu 9.04 system recently told us that his wireless keyboard and mouse worked perfectly with Kubuntu, but he had trouble getting it to work with Windows. The irony was that it was a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. He also bought a brand new HP printer which worked right away with Kubuntu, no problem at all. It took him 25 minutes to get the thing working properly with Windows though.

Jimmi, join us here in the 21st century when you’re ready ok ?

Eruaran

Oh and PS: Kubuntu worked right away with his Netgear PCI wireless card as well. To get it working under Windows you have to remove the card, install the software, then put the card back in again.

Got a new Fujitsu notebook ? A BenQ ? Asus ? No problem. That old four year old Toshiba Tecra you can’t run Vista on ? No problem. The leading GNU/Linux distributions will have your notebook running faster and working more productively than it ever has.

Are we getting the picture yet ?

The Mad Hatter

Let’s see:

0) Linux has a lower Total Cost of Ownership.
1) Installing software on any modern linux is far easier than doing it on Windows.
2) Linux has far better driver support.
3) Linux is virus proof.
4) Linux is stable (no BSOD).
5) Linux has lesser hardware requirements.
6) Linux has more available software.
7) Linux has more available games (I count them seperately).
8) Software for Linux is higher quality.
9) With Linux you are free.

You’re crazy if you don’t use it.

tom jackson

Cool article. Usually, these “Linux kills Microsoft on the desktop” predictions are made at the beginning of the year. It is refreshing to see such a prediction welcoming spring for a change. Hoping to see the same initiative next year.

Boog

I have tried SUSE and Ubuntu – Neither installs went right. Once installed using the OS was like watching a Black & White TV instead of my 42 inch LCD TV. Open Office doesn’t compare to Microsoft Office. Maybe compares to Word but no where near like Excel and Access.

Rick Hodgin

If you look at the evolution of OpenOffice, from 2.x to 3.0, you’ll see huge changes. Plus, OpenOffice runs on every platform there is as it’s open source and can be compiled as needed. Microsoft Office is x86-Windows only. —- there are far more advantages to having multi-platform support with somewhat less features, than Windows-only with somewhat better features. Also, I believe any developer can join the open office development team if you want, to improve the product.

Boog

Microsoft Office for Mac runs great. I agree that OpenOffice got much better between 2. and 3. but it still doesn’t compare with MS Office. I am not in love with M$ but they have better products at a premium price. I do really like Win 7 RC though – can’t stand Exchange though and refuse to run it. I make my decisions based on the application that I need to run and will go from company to company depending on what I need. Right now M$ has more applications that I need to run my business. I like the competition and encourage it.

The Mad Hatter

Boog,

If you want something better than Microsoft Office, try IWork. In my opinion it makes MS Office look like junk.

As to having problems installing Open SUSE and Ubuntu, I’ve installed Linux countless times, and had way less problems installing Linux than I have had installing Windows. Of course I never try to install Linux until I’ve run the Live CD on the machine.

As to Windows Vista 7, I’ve seen it now, and I’m totally unimpressed. I’ll make you a bet that between 12-18 months after it’s release Microsoft starts talking up Windows 8.

Tikolosh

i have been trying to migrate to Linux since 1997. In the beginning I always had one piece of hardware that wouldn’t work – and I had adopted the mindset of Microsoft just works. Well it does – I may get blasted by people for this BUT the stroy is not finished.

So through the years i have tried Suse, Slackware, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Madrake, Mandriva etc. I never found a distro that was 100% to muy liking.

That was till I discovered xubuntu. Wow. What an awesome OS. Basically ubuntu with the lightweight Xfse desktop. Man It took this os to make me dump my Windows XP. It is awesome and everything just works. I have managed to get the wireless working without too much fuss. Software install is a breeze. For the savvy user you can sudo apt-get from a bash terminal and for the noobs you can use the synaptic package manager.

As for installation:
It can be installed from wihtin windows if a person wants a duel boot. and can also be run as a live cd to test and be deployed from there – or it can be installed from boot.

I like it and am looking forward to more advances.

As for WIndows 7 – yeah it looks and operates nicely enough – I just had a problem recently – 2 hours back trying to install it on a Dell desktop. upon starting the install off the cd – the install stops and mentions that it is unable to find a driver for the CD-rom. LOL. so i was like – screw that and dropped the whole insall.

Xubuntu For The Win!

Bill

I have switch over all my kids old dell computers to Ubuntu. The computers is faster now than before and no more viruses. The old My sister and I have switch her two sons HPs to Ubuntu–xp and vista were so slow and a dead craw. Compared to vista, Ubuntu is rock solid. Window 7 will not work with lots of old hardware forcing you to update components. MS games to force you to upgrade. I really think MS deliberate does not make a product complete to force upgrades. I have not seen any printer issues at all. I find setting up network printer on a xp machine to be easy as pie. I use openoffice. Our school district switched to OO and save millions over MS Office cost per seats. OO is set up to save automatically in .doc files.

John Rogers

Greetings everyone. Needless to say, Linux is great. Canonical is certainly going in the right direction with Ubuntu. Here on Geek.com, my specialty is turning Linux into toys for play or for work. I love building useful appliances out of Ubuntu and I can proudly say that I have banned Microsoft products in my household. When my daughter is old enough to use a computer, she will be provided with a Linux desktop. There are NO Microsoft desktops in our home and because of that, we are free from the proprietary mess that the masses are entangled in daily. Case in point, the Open Source Community is AWESOME. Recently, I was hard pressed to find a way to process AVCHD video from my HD camera (Panasonic doesn’t provide a Linux tool) so I saved all teh raw footage, and waited patiently, and not too long, the Open Source Community delivered! I now use Handbrake to pull my recordings into a more common format and they can be edited and burned to DVD discs now on my Ubuntu machines. I LOVE Linux and community driven software! It truly is the best. Here on Geek, watch for my articles as I build things and show you how to do it yourself. For Linux newcomers, I highly recommend the book “Ubuntu Linux Bible” available on Amazon. It helps newcomers get over the learning curve and is an excellent resource even for the power user. Hail to the Linux Desktop! I wish to thank all those who contribute to the Open Source Community for all their hard work!

Tight

Or stay with Windoz and constantly have expensive software to buy. Everything has its downfall so be positive Microsoft has competition they need it or we get millennium edition or vista and have to put up with it.

Ken

My Ubuntu & Kbuntu worked with my HP 4050 laser using CUPS (comes with the distributions), my Cannon inkjet and my Lexmark ink jet. It picked up my display automatically and I was able to easily tweak the appearance through the settings console, which unlike Windows Control Panel, is organized by functional group. Although, I own a copy of Vista Home Premium, it gave me fits for a couple of weeks because of an incompatible graphics card, so I switched to Kbuntu on that computer and havent had a problem (now going into the 6th month of Kbuntu on that computer. Opera, Seamonkey, The World, Flock, Avant and Firefox are all faster on the linux boxes than on the windows boxes. Software and security updating is also easier.

Hands down, Ubuntu won the ease of installation, getting connected to a network and simply working. I had reinstalled a Linux distribution for my niece’s eePc but this was the first ‘virgin’ install. Perfect for most, if not all applications.

I’ve been using Linux since about 2003 and it’s really come on in leaps and bounds since then – if you’ve tried it a while ago, now is the time to take another look; you may find yourself very impressed!

My personal choice has to be Ubuntu – I’ve been using it since 2005. In 95% of installations, it works without hitch. There have been one or two cases where it’s not worked out so well, specifically on certain laptops (Toshiba and Sony) and the current video drivers for Intel chipsets are undergoing heavy development, so there are currently (mid 2009) a few gremlins there.

But, and here’s the unique selling point really, you can simply grab a copy of Ubuntu, boot your machine into Ubuntu off the CD and see for yourself whether it works as you want; if it doesn’t, it hasn’t cost you anything except a bit of time, and your existing system is left untouched.

This issue has been addressed and there is an active group of people using this device. I would also highly recommend that you join the ubuntuforums.org forum as many of the people on there are great with assisting with matters such as these.

At Powerpets we’ve used Linux since 2002. When we started our site in May of that year, it grew too fast for our own little backyard operation. By August, our windows boxes were getting infected weeks before McAfee would consider a virus a medium threat. Spending 2-3 days a week struggling with keeping the computers up and running was nuts.
We installed WinLin (which was then sued and changed their name to Linspire) until it was bought out by some company that neglected it.
A few months ago, we made the switch to Ubuntu, and it was great.
We don’t use Windows for anything anymore, including our Flash. Unfortunately Wine only runs up to Flash 8 Pro, though last week, Wine released some fixed which will enable support for Flash CS4 (we’re trying out the fixes this week).

Windows has been a thing of the past for a long time now. The only issue we really had was some new type of wireless network USB stick back in 2004, that gave some trouble installing. Other than that, things have been great and we’ve been virus free and almost TCO free. Linux has saved us tons of time and money and Ubuntu definitely has become a leader of the pack as far as Windows replacement for home and small business users go.